Tag Archives: layers

Cut not the wings of your dreams…

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Cut not the wings of your dreams ....Hello friends

I hope everyone is well and happy.

This spread is from my 6″ x 6″ journal.  I covered the pages with printed tissue paper then coloured them with yellow and green sparkly paint, the same batch that had set to a thick jelly and I thought would be unuseable.  Then I added the borders with red acrylic paint.  I know, I know another strange colour (Eng. spelling :-)) combination from me, but I like it.  The background text is from a Tim Holtz reflections stamp. The two patches under the images are some translucent paper I coloured and edged with  distress inks.  The image of the man’s head is from the Graphics Fairy‘s blog.  The girl with the wings may also be from the Graphic Fairy.

The wonderful quote is from Flavia.

That’s all for now.

Big love

AJ


Revo-lution 2012 – Gratitude

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GratitudeHello friends!

I hope everyone is feeling good.

I’m really pleased to say I am feeling much better this weekend and also that I’ve been given a new project at work which should be more interesting than the work I’ve been doing for the past year (although I will probably have to still do that as well).  I’m optimistic about it anyway, it seems like a good change for me.

Here is another spread from my Revo-lution 2012 board book.  Check out Gretchen Miller’s blog, Creativity in Motion, for more information about the thinking behind the Revolution book.

Sometimes things in my life are not exactly as I want them to be and if I allow myself I can get to feeling hard done by.  I’ve realised it does no good to just feel sorry for myself so my intention this year is to appreciate and feel gratitude for all the good things in my life.   When I think about it seriously it is obvious to me the good things far out-number the percieved bad, or problem, things in my life.

Thanks to everyone for your kind comments on my blog, I do try to answer everyone and visit your blogs too. Recently I’ve been having problems leaving comments on Blogger blogs.  I’m not sure if that’s a Blogger problem, a WordPress problem or (and this is much more likely) an AJ problem!  I’ll try and get it sorted.

My life can be a bit hectic –  I work full time and I am committed to the success of our local history group and need to keep the RSHG website up- to-date.  Now if I could just have … ooh I don’t know … maybe an extra 4 or 5 hours to each day … I might stand a chance of getting everything done.  I know I’m not alone and most creative people have the same dilemas juggling with the day to day stuff.  I am still managing to do some art every day, even if it’s only a teeny weeny bit, it’s good for my soul 🙂

Hope you are all being wondrously industrious with your creativity.

Big love

AJ

That was January and here comes February

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Hello Friends

I hope everyone is well, I’ve been sick again since Sunday and am having a few days off work to hopefully recuperate.  I saw the doctor today and he is arranging for me to have physiotherapy on my neck.  The neck seems to be a problem area for me, causing severe headaches and nausea.  The doctor also gave me some medicine to take to stop the sickness so that I should at least be able to take and, more importantly, keep down pain-killers when necessary.

Anyway I still managed to get my January calander completed and the new page for February is ready for tomorrow.  I will try and use more images for February.  January seems to have zipped by in a flash!

T and I are making plans for a short holiday in July to celebrate his 60th birthday we are going up north to Yorkshire, where he was born, for a week.  At first he was very reluctant to go away because since our last holiday together we have adopted two beautiful cats.  T didn’t like the idea of putting them into a cattery for the week, so he is paying someone to come and house/cat sit for us.  I’m sure ‘the boys’ will still be freaked out at having a stranger in the house, but it should be OK as soon as they realise he is going to pet and feed them and let them out every morning.   We live in a cemetery and the cats are allowed out in the morning and can play in the cemetery all day, but we like to have them inside at night.  There are foxes in the cemetery and although everyone says that in general cats and foxes tolerate eachother and in a fight the fox is likely to come off worse we don’t want to risk it.  As far as we can tell ‘the boys’ don’t venture outside of the cemetery, it covers 12 acres of land so they don’t really need to go out on the roads.  But then who really knows what they get up to when they are out of sight?

That’s all for now, I hope to get back to normal soon.

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

 

 

 

Revo-lution 2012 – Kindness

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KindnessHello friends!

I hope everyone is well and happy.  I must admit I’m a bit under the weather at the moment and have spent most of today in bed.  It will pass I just need to rest up for a couple of days, so I probably won’t go to work tomorrow.

The spread above is from my 5″ x 5″ Revo-lution 2012 board book inspired by a workshop I did on 21 Secrets last year with Gretchen Miller.  Gretchen has information and an e-book all about the Revolution available on her blog here.

This image reflects my desire to become a kinder person.  I really like the way it came out.  I painted the pages with a pink fluorscent paint I found in my stash when I tidied up my work room recently.

The paint must be nearly 20 years old because I remember I originally used it to paint on big fabric hangings that were used to decorate walls at clubs and parties where my husband DJ’d.  When the hangings were lit with UV/black light the colours really glowed.  Anyway despite its age most of the paint is still useable so I’ve moved it into my paint storage drawers for easy access.

Also on this spread I transferred text from a book directly onto the page using gel medium.  Thanks to Donna Downey for the tip on how to do that, it’s really easy and the results are amazing, although I must admit you can’t see them too well in the picture.  I stamped over with my tiny flower and tiny dots stamps.  The hands are cut from a magazine, the letters are from a word game I bought in a charity shop and are stuck on over a piece of scrap paper.  The hearts were cut with my new BigShot 🙂 and I stuck the three words onto pre-made tags from K & Co which were attached with a decorative brad.

That’s all for now folks, I’ve exhausted myself and need to go and lie down again for a while.

See you later

Big Love

AJ 🙂

Doodles Unleashed – Playful Printmaking

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Hello friends!

Strathmore has some fantastic free online workshops at the moment and I decided to sign up for the wonderful Traci Bautista‘s Doodles Unleashed.

If I was a more disciplined person I wouldn’t have done this because there are other things I really should be doing right now, however, I am a hopeless addict to creativity and I couldn’t resist!  I watched both video turorials for week 1 Playful Printmaking and then created the above image.  It is in a big (12 x 16 inch) Daler Rowney 300 g/m water colour pad.

I was a bit out of my comfort zone creating this page, but I am happy with the way it turned out.  I had to laugh because my husband came into the room while I was working on it, he rarely comments on my art, but he looked at this page and said “Hmmm, that’s very psychedelic”!!  He didn’t say whether he liked it or now though?

Right, let’s see if I can get this report written before I’m tempted to start the second workshop Spontaneous Water Colour Backgrounds, it’s going to be tough so wish me luck 😉

Big love

AJ

Why do birds sing?

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Hello friends!

I hope everyone had a good Christmas and spent time with the people and doing the things they love the best.

We spent Christmas day with my parents and yesterday we had a friend over for lunch and went for a long walk along a beach.

My parents gave me a Love Links bracelet and two sets of beads for Christmas, it’s really lovely and something I will treasure always.  It was to replace the ring they gave me a couple of years ago.  I had that ring on my hand for a couple of months and then one day when I was working on the outside of the house it disappeared.  I was heartbroken about losing it and searched high and low but couldn’t find it.  Mum wanted to buy me a replacement ring but I thought the bracelet would be safer.

My husband gave me a Sizzix Big Shot (although he didn’t know that until I unwrapped it on Christmas morning, he just knew he had paid for a large box) and I’ve been busy embossing papers and cutting shapes when ever I’ve had a few spare minutes.

The spread above about the birds is not one of my most inspired but it happens to be the next page in the journal.  I’ve decided to share good and bad as it’s all part of the process.  This spread actually looks grubby to me and I have no idea where that dirty colour came from…

I am back to work tomorrow so I have to use today to catch up with a few outstanding projects.

You can see the gifts I made for my friends for Christmas on the Little Boxes and Things page.

See you all soon

Big love

AJ

All wrapped up and Ready to Go

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Hello Friends

First of all I’d like to wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.  May all your dreams come true 🙂  I’ve added a little festive snow to my blog.

With just a week to go all the hand made presents are finished and ready to be delivered.  I hope my friends enjoy them, I had fun making them, so I hope that will show through.

I can’t tell you what’s inside the parcels yet, but I will show you after Christmas.

Now I can relax a bit and stop panicing.  I will be at work all this week and on Wednesday I am going to meet the other members of my team for the first time (I work in a remote location) and we will be having a Christmas lunch.  That should be fun, I’ve spoken to a couple of them on the phone and they sounded nice.

The spread above is another from my 6×6 journal – textured gesso ground, torn pages from an old dictionary, vintage images of women, acrylic paint, stamping and hand drawn swirls and writing.  Afterwards I thought it probably would have been better to have printed the words as, like many people, when I try to write by hand it hardly ever comes out as I expect and this was a style I’d not tried before.  I wasn’t entirely happy with the results, but hey-ho that’s how things turn out sometimes and I do like the message.  My life has been extraordinary so far, I’m grateful for that and hoping for more extraordinariness in the future, for me and for you too.

Oh, I just noticed the date 18 December 2011! Today is the 41st anniversary of my first date with my soul mate and life companion. Wow, now isn’t that extraordinary!

See you soon.

Big love

AJ

Everyone…

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Hello Friends!

Sorry I haven’t time to write much today, I’m in my usual seasonal panic before Christmas.  I’m still trying to make the last of the presents and I’m struggling!  Why do I take on these ambitious projects?!  I am working on the last two and hope to get them done by the weekend.  I’ve made a couple of errors which have set me back a bit, but I’ve just had to work around them because I don’t have time to start from scratch now.

This is another spread from my small 6×6 journal – textured gesso, Inktense and acrylic paint, some scrap paper and more gesso and stamped and written words.

Before I go I’m going to recommend you check out Gretchen Miller’s blog Creativity in Motion she has a great post today about a Gratitude Scroll.  Gretchen ran my favourite workshop over at 21 Secrets where we made a Revo-lution book for ourselves.  Eventually I will get around to sharing that with you here, but in the meantime check out her blog, it has loads of wonderful creative ideas.

See you soon

Big love

AJ 🙂

 

Choosing to be happy

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Hello Friends!

I hope the Christmas preparations are all going well for you all.  I’ve almost ground to a halt, I only have a few things left to do, but my enthusiasm has waned and it will be a last minute rush again as it always is.

I am astonished that I had to get to the age of 56 before I realised how I feel is only partially influenced by external things and I can actually make a decision about the kind of day I will have.  So I am choosing to be happy.  Of course I won’t always be successful but I am going to give it my best shot.  Well they do say that practice makes perfect, so I am sure the more I practice being happy the easier it’s going to get.

Please don’t get me wrong I don’t have any big issues in my life that make me unhappy, it’s just that I can be a bit of a moaner at times and I am beginning to really appreciate that everything is so much better when I stay in the positive zone.

This is the second spread in my small 6×6 journal.  The background is textured gesso with some acrylic and Inktense on the top.  I used little scraps of paper and some scraps from old books, which had been die cut and sprayed with Adirondak colorwash spray in plum.  I wrote the words with my atyou spica lavender pen and edged the pages with Adirondak Bright Purple Twilight ink.

I just realised that two weeks today will be Christmas Day (I almost swore!)  Oops I’d better get a move on!

See you soon

Big love

AJ

Completeness

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Hello Friends, I hope everyone is well.

So this is the final bit to show you of my first art journal – the cover.  I left the cover till last for two reasons, firstly so that I could carry the journal around with the plain cover so it would not attract too much attention (although it did start to intrigue people as it ‘fattened up’); and secondly because while I was working on the journal the cover got covered in paint and dirty marks and by leaving the decoration until the end it meant that I could make the finished journal look ‘pretty’.

One day a friend saw the journal on my desk at work and without asking grabbed it and started looking through it, it felt a bit like he had picked up my personal diary and started to read it.  I don’t think he was very impressed.  He said “Who’s done this?” and I replied “Me” to which he enquired “And how old were you when you did it?”

On front and back covers there is gesso, collage, stamping, acrylic and watercolour paints and distress inks.

On the Front cover I added a little bit of bling and a panel with the title ‘AJ’s Art Journal’.  I found some big cardboard floor dominos made for small children in a charity shop.  I actually liked the images that were on the dominos but I also found that I could peel the shiney cover off them, decorate them and for the cover title I used glossy accents to give it a shine.  I didn’t know how to make a closure so I sewed a flower bead on the front and back covers and used a bit of fibre to wrap around the beads and form the closure.  I also added fibres to the wire spine of the journal.

The panel on the back cover is something I found by the waste bin at work, it’s an identification plate for a pump, and I coloured it with stazon ink, put two brads through the screw holes and stuck the whole thing on with glossy accents.

I’ve shown this image before but this is the finished journal.  I really love it and I’ve had so much fun making, showing it and I’ve really appreciated the encouragement, lovely comments and the new friends I’ve made.

Creative people are just The Best!

That’s all for now, see you soon

Big love

AJ